Ages of Man

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ages of Man begins with paradise and ends with annihilation. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing between 750 and 650 BC, described a moment when the gods would abandon humanity entirely. When babies are born with gray hair, he wrote, 'there will be no help against evil.' Two complete accounts survive from antiquity. Hesiod set down his version in Works and Days; the Roman poet Ovid later told a similar story in the Metamorphoses. Both trace the same fall: humans once lived without labor, in peace with one another and with the earth. Both poets marked the stages of that fall with metals of decreasing worth. Yet in a detail neither pauses to explain, those same metals grow harder as they lose their value.

• 2. Hesiod's Five Ages

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  The Golden Age, the first of Hesiod's five stages, fell under the rule of Cronus and was created by the immortals of Olympus. Those who lived in it reached very old age without losing their youthful appearance. When death finally came, it came peacefully.

  The Silver Age began when Cronus gave way to Zeus, and it was a sharply diminished world. Men of the Silver Age lived for one hundred years under the dominion of their mothers. Their adult lives were brief and filled with strife. They refused to worship the gods, and Zeus destroyed them for that refusal. In death, they became what Hesiod called 'blessed spirits' of the underworld.

  Zeus made the men of the Bronze Age from the wood of the ash tree. Violence was their defining impulse; Ares, god of war, governed their desires. Their armor, their homes, and their tools were all forged from bronze. They destroyed one another and left no named spirits behind. They passed into the 'house of Hades' and were forgotten.

  Then came the Iron Age, and Hesiod was not describing a future he feared. He was describing his own time. Children in this age dishonor their parents. Brother turns against brother. The ancient bond between guest and host has been abandoned. Might makes right. Bad men use lies to be thought good. At the peak of this age, no one feels shame or indignation at wrongdoing. Zeus will end it, but only after every god has turned away.

  Yet Hesiod inserted one more age between the Bronze and the Iron, an age that belongs to no metal at all.

• 3. The Heroic Exception

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  At Thebes, in the time of Cadmus and Oedipus, some of the heroes fought their wars. Others went to Troy. These were the men of the one age in Hesiod's account that carries no metal name. It is also the only stage that actually improves upon the age before it. After their wars, the heroes were taken to a land beyond the seas, ruled by Cronus, where sweet fruits flourished three times a year. They lived far from the deathless gods. When Ovid came to retell the same myth, the shape he gave it was notably different.

• 4. Ovid's Revision

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  In lines 89 through 150 of his poem, Ovid told his own version of the Ages. He arrived at four stages, not five; the Heroic Age is absent.

  In the Golden Age, Ovid noted, men had no knowledge of navigation and so the larger world remained entirely beyond their reach. Innocence and justice defined life among them; they did not suffer.

  Saturn's fate marks the transition into the Silver Age. When Saturn was driven into Tartarus, Jupiter took charge and introduced the seasons to the world. Men learned the art of agriculture and inhabited houses.

  The Bronze Age, in Ovid's telling, produced men prone to warfare but not yet to impiety. That restraint disappears entirely in the Iron Age. Nations demarcate their boundaries. Men learn to mine the earth and to navigate the seas. Greed, impiety, and a desire for war take hold. Truth, modesty, and loyalty are nowhere to be found. Astraea, the goddess of justice, leaves an Earth bathed in slaughter. Unlike Hesiod, Ovid did not consider himself a resident of this age. He wrote the Iron Age as history, a catastrophe already past by the time he set down his account. Plato, for one, found Hesiod's golden men in need of reinterpretation.

• 5. Ancient Readers

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  In the Cratylus, Plato recorded a conversation between Socrates and Hermogenes about what Hesiod actually meant by a race of gold. Socrates argued that Hesiod's golden men were not literally made of that metal. They were good and noble. He described them as daimones, or spirits upon the Earth. The word daimones, he explained, derives from daēmones, a Greek term meaning 'knowing' or 'wise.' These spirits were beneficent; they prevented ills and served as guardians of mortals.

  The Bibliotheca, attributed to Apollodorus and dated to around the 2nd century BC, offers a different kind of reading. That text places the end of the Bronze Age at the flood of Deucalion. Propertius, writing in the 1st century BC in his Elegies, connected that same flood to the end of the Golden Age instead. The two accounts agree that a catastrophic flood closed an era; they disagree on which one.

  The most precisely dated interpretation belongs to Saint Jerome, writing in the fourth century AD. In his chronology, the Golden Age lasted from approximately 1710 to 1674 BC. The Silver Age ran from 1674 to 1628 BC. The Bronze Age covered 1628 to 1472 BC. The Heroic Age stretched from 1460 to 1103 BC. As for the Iron Age, Jerome considered it still ongoing in his own time. The terms these poets had coined were about to be borrowed for an entirely different purpose.

• 6. Modern Afterlives

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  Bronze Age and Iron Age, the terms Hesiod used to name two stages of moral decline, entered the vocabulary of modern historians. They were repurposed to classify ancient cultures not by their moral condition but by their dominant metalworking practices, following the Stone Age. This classification is called the three-age system.

  The Golden Age traveled a different path. That phrase became a shorthand for civilizational peak. The Golden Age of India, the Islamic Golden Age, and the Han and Tang dynasties of China are all described in these terms. In each case, the phrase carries the implication Hesiod would have recognized: a time of flourishing, now gone.

  In the mythological framework, the Bronze Age was a sign of humanity's fall. In the archaeological framework, it marks humanity's rise above stone tools.